2/10/09

Why Geithner Sucks

The New York Times reports that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner “prevailed” against several top Obama aides in “opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions” in the debate on the bailout. Geithner successfully blocked “more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid” and replacing top bank executives and wiping out “shareholders at institutions receiving aid.”

Wearing bright yellow hats and t-shirts with pictures of sharks and the words "Stop Loan Sharks," protesters had already targeted the home of John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley, at 6 Club Road, Rye, N.Y. earlier in the day.

At Frey's house, 10 Glenville Road, Greenwich, they chanted slogans such as "Fix our loans, save our homes." They placed furniture on the lawn to symbolize the dislocation felt by people who have had their homes foreclosed upon and been evicted, their belongings tossed outside by state marshals.

"We did it to make them feel what it must be like for someone to have their home foreclosed upon," NACA mortgage counselor Carmen Orta said.

Called the "Predators Tour" these actions were the start of NACA's "accountability campaign," an aggressive, confrontational protest aimed at several top executives of companies that refuse to allow NACA to renegotiate the terms of loans on behalf of members, according to NACA CEO Bruce Marks.

This is a fight over how to solve what is the 2nd Great Depression.

And the haves are already uncomfortable at giving up the 3rd vacation palace, the corporate jets, corporate paid and government subsidized vacation junkets and cutting back on their nannies time to save a few bucks. Just imagine what will have to be done to get them to pay attention to little people all around them - for no other reason than the fact that it is the right thing to do?

In the last year, the housing situation has deteriorated precipitously, from an already bad situation. Christopher Leinberger in an article called The Next Slum? (Atlantic, March 2008):

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, "I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen."

In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, "There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years."

So, houses are empty, and falling to ruin. It's as senseless as destroying crops while people are hungry - the sign of a completely deranged kind of economy. And more and more Americans are finding themselves in squatter tent cities. This is Ontario, CA:

And this Reno, Nevada:

In Miami last week, over a thousand applicants lined up, some camping for two nights in line, to apply for 35 fire fighter jobs with starting pay of $47,000 a year.

Back in the Depression, things got pretty rough. And it's arguably part of why the New Deal did as much as it did for the have-nots - something we've not seen a whole lot of for many years here in the U.S. I've not heard of the website Bits of News before. The food part of this diary is drawn from there. The article, "Hunger on the March" by Garrett Johnson a year ago, has such a good closer, that I'm not going to try to better it.

Some people may be under the impression that FDR's election and the New Deal was simply a logical reaction to extreme hardships. That democracy naturally corrected itself. That wasn't the case. It took a grassroots movement, working against all odds, to push the government into action. It's a lesson we should remember in 2009, even if a Democrat wins the White House.

It's gonna be getting worse before it gets better. And consulting that above-the-fold graphic, the longer the delay, the worse it's gonna get. It's hard to see any way around that.

Hooverville, Central Park, New York City

Frankly and honestly, the have nots have a whole hell of a lot more to worry about -life, death, shelter and food - than the haves minor inconveniences to their pampered lives and stock portfolios in a Depression that they caused.

Some previous pieces from Land of Enchantment for those of you that might not get it:

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Larry Craig and David Vitter — “two United States Senators implicated in extramarital sexual activity” — have named themselves as co-sponsors of S.J. Res. 43, the Marriage Protection Amendment. If passed, the bill would amend the Constitution to declare that marriage “shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.”